I learned to listen as elementary student in the Union Deposit three-room schoolhouse during the 1940s. First and second grades were taught in one room, third through fifth grades in a second room, and sixth through eighth grades in a third room. Each classroom had its own teacher.

I had five different teachers during eight grades of schooling there. I was in love with every one of them except the fifth. I learned to love that teacher, Miss Anna, a quarter of the way through adulthood. But in the years I was her student I was scared of her. Miss Anna’s appearance in dark grey, blue, or black coat-sweaters, ankle-length skirts, and black old-lady shoes was formidable, her mannerisms, strict, and her expectations, high.

I thought Miss Anna’s one redeeming virtue was that she allowed me to ring the school bell at the beginning and close of the school day as well as at recess times. My opinion was wrong, but, at the time, the bell-ringing privilege she granted me mattered more than correcting my opinion. I could insert frustration and anger into every pull of the rope and become one with the pealing Ding Dong, Ding Dong, Ding Dong …

Classrooms had a long bench in the front of the room. The benches faced the blackboard where students of one grade sat while their class was being taught. Students in the other grades sat at regimentally arranged wooden desks in the other two thirds of the classroom, doing homework, or preparing for their class time up front. Most of the desks were two-student stations. Teachers’ pets claimed, and troublemakers were assigned to, the several one-person desks. I sometimes sat at a single-student desk.

Union Deposit’s three-room-schoolhouse atmosphere was a splendid venue for learning to listen. When my grade was not up front I could pay attention to students in the class that was up front, as each child recited understanding of a geography or history topic, or explained a reading problem in arithmetic. It paid to pay attention to speakers in the grade lower than my own – knowing the answers they were seeking confirmed my having learned something the previous year. And it paid to pay attention to speakers in the grade ahead – a fourth-grader could get a head start on fifth-grade learning.

So I listened to the circulating currents of words up front. But there was more to hear in the rest of the room.

There was rustling of papers. There were bams of books being shoved into backspaces of desks, and thuds as they fell onto the floor. There were squeals when inkwells overflowed and moans when pencils points broke off (one was allowed to use the pencil sharpener on the teacher’s desk only at recesses). There were whispers student-to-student as well as whistles of air as secret notes were passed.

There were over twenty-five faces and bodies to watch – some studying intently, some daydreaming, one or two trying to hide gum-chewing, nap-takers, spitball aimers and ouchers – to name a few. There were bare-naked and blooming trees outside the windows, and dusty or frosty patterns on the windowpanes, and spiders crawling in and out of the baseboard cracks. There was a squeaky floorboard. There was the spitting of frozen mittens as they thawed on the skirt of the pot-bellied stove, yielding a smokiness that seemed to land on the tongue en route to the nose.

There were even more than all of those sounds plus the call of voices in my schoolbooks. It wouldn’t be honest to say that I heard all. But it is truthful to say that while being quiet, as was required of students, in the midst of all there was to hear I learned to listen.

In that way, and, at an early age, I discerned an inner flow of things.